The 1978 series holds more than a few surprises in context of the trope it employs that is a classic in British children’s fantasy. You know the one, where a child is sent away to live with a distant relative, sometimes because they are orphaned, sometimes because the parents travel or are too rich to actually have time for the […]
» Read moreThis 1981 television adaptation of Maurice Gee’s 1979 book at least proves New Zealand children’s TV at the time wasn’t as embarrassing as your mind might conjure. At least this particular show can make that claim, being fairly compelling and well-directed for most of the time despite the inevitable clunkiness that will rear its head at moments. The story follows […]
» Read moreDystopian YA clutters the current landscape to such a degree that it’s hard to remember a time when such tales registered way below most people’s radar and were, in fact, a rarity. Maybe that accounts for how seldom you hear Knights of God evoked when talking about old television shows. Only broadcast one time ever in England, in 1987, and […]
» Read moreBased on the book by Lucy Boston, which was followed by five others in a series mostly about the house and its history and partially about the characters featured in this story, The Children Of Green Knowe is the kind of quiet exercise that doesn’t often get made for kids anymore. Perhaps it is outdated in this way, but there’s something to […]
» Read moreThe structure of this series — four 30 minute episodes — makes it tempting to say that this is really a film split up into parts, but that’s not really the case. In fact, it’s the splitting that partly gives it charm, and partly to mash it together would only work to expose its flaws. There was a time when […]
» Read moreThe 1976 children’s series Children of the Stones (Amazon) comes up again and again in lists from British folk pulling from their childhood for the television shows and movies that creeped them out the most. And creepy is the central mood of the series as it pulls from the trope of strange English villages with sinister secrets being kept from the […]
» Read moreThat the so-called experts have crowned The Starlost as the worst science fiction television series ever shows how little experts can be relied upon sometimes. Without getting into a diatribe extolling the virtues of The Starlost — I’ve done it before and I can do it again — I’d like to suggest the experts are wrong, and further submit outrage […]
» Read moreThere is probably no better moment to revisit this little-remembered British television show from almost 40 years ago, since no point in time has seemed more like the events portrayed in 1979’s Noah’s Castle (Amazon) than the present. Our 21st Century post-Bush, Obama years reality is one that sometimes seems to be disintegrating before our eyes, a situation similar to the one […]
» Read moreA lot of reviewers choose to bury The Starlost but I’m here to praise it. And I’m here to do so in celebration of the most unexpected iteration of futuristic television viewing I can imagine — The Starlost Roku channel (though the show is also available on DVD for you old technologists out there). You got it. A whole Roku channel devoted […]
» Read moreParanoia seemed like it had an audience in film in the 1970s, but not so much in television, let alone children’s television, unless you count The Night Stalker. It wouldn’t become standard fare until the 1990s, when The X Files made such discomfort not only palatable, but preferable to genre series. That makes Codename: Icarus, from 1981, not only early […]
» Read moreSometimes, you love things that you don’t actually like. Anyone with relatives knows the feeling. It is that way with TV shows, often ones from your childhood experience, but sometimes you encounter something as an adult that is quite something for what it is, even as it doesn’t quite hit the mark, and it touches you somehow. And so it […]
» Read moreThis apparently very rare 1987 British TV show for kids admittedly feels like it’s a ‘70s show, but I think that’s one of its strengths, actually, since it veers into darkness while retaining a quality of innocence. Perhaps this is a result of the struggle between the nice enough script and the never-seen-a-performance-quite-like-this-on-a-kid’s show turn by Shirley Henderson. As the […]
» Read moreCreated by the two gentleman that gave us K9 on Doctor Who – Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who wrote 32 episodes of the original Who series and some Wallace and Gromit, including the Were-Rabbit movie – Sky is psychedelic kid’s science fiction TV in the best possible sense of the phrase. Aired in 1975, it involves, superficially, an injured […]
» Read moreThis ITV children’s series was adapted from the 1958 book Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr, which is probably a lot more familiar as the source material for the 1988 film Paperhouse, which was apparently nowhere near as faithful to the book as this 1972 version (though some accuse it of lifting the TV show’s visual style). I don’t remember enjoying […]
» Read moreThis show about the deep, dark times before any real recorded history was aired in the dead, dark times of Saturday morning television, full of non-ironic weirdness and delights, the early 1970s. This was my era of kids’ shows, and the one thing that fasciantes me more than the shows I did watch and enjoy are the ones that I […]
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